


In A Dangerous Time

by thinlizzy2



Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV)
Genre: F/M, post episode 1x18 providence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-05-11
Updated: 2014-05-11
Packaged: 2018-01-19 22:10:03
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 8
Words: 6,406
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1485901
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thinlizzy2/pseuds/thinlizzy2
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Both love and war change Jemma's life in ways she never would have imagined.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. As if your love's a crime

**Author's Note:**

  * For [flipflop_diva](https://archiveofourown.org/users/flipflop_diva/gifts).



"I love you." There is a gentle hand on Jemma's shoulder - a familiar comfort. "You need to know that. I really, really love you."

Leo Fitz usually isn't the demonstrative type, but with everything going on the sudden declaration doesn't seem that surprising. Jemma smiles softly at him, her mind already fast-forwarding a half-hour or so to a hot shower and a soft bed. "I love you too. And I'm sorry if I've been a bit distracted lately. We'll take a walk or something tomorrow; we'll unwind."

Her best friend stares at her as if she'd started speaking Swahili, and that's her first clue that something's off. It's quickly followed by others. Why is sweating? Is he unwell? "Jemma, please." He bites at his lips; his eyes are earnest and pleading. "Don't make me keep saying it. I _love_ you. Like, properly."

And her heart sinks.

"No." Her hands come up to rub at her temples. "Oh no, Fitz, no." She can't handle this as well. Not now.

It isn't until she catches a glimpse of his pale and stricken face that she realises how her words must have sounded. She reaches out, hoping in vain to snatch them back out of the air, but he's already stumbling towards the door. 

"Well, sorry to have bothered you. I'll leave you alone." He slams the door behind him, but not before Jemma spies the shine of tears on his cheeks.

Desperate, she tears through the corridors after him. She corners him right outside her sleeping quarters, a rare stroke of luck, and grabs hold of his sleeve. She stares at the burgundy fabric all fisted up in her hand. She bought him this sweater; it looks nice on him. "Look, just come in here. Let's talk."

He tries to pull away. "There's nothing to-"

She cuts him off. "You can come and talk to me in here, or we can do this out in the open." 

As soon as the door closes behind her, she realises her mistake. Providence is not a spacious base; her bed takes up most of the room and there's barely space for the two of them to stand. They stare at the bed as if it might be booby-trapped, and then Jemma perches on the edge of her desk. "I'm sorry."

Fitz laughs, a joyless sound. "For not loving me? I don't think it's your fault."

"It's not like that." She starts and stops. Because it is like that, and that's never been a problem before. She and Fitz have been as close as two friends can get. They're siblings and best friends, collaborators and confidants. Love, romantic love, has never come into it. And that's the only the only kind of love that Jemma knows she doesn't feel for him.

The lack of it doesn't stop her heart from breaking.

"You're my best friend." It sounds like a consolation prize. "You're the most important person in my life."

"And I'm in love with you, but you're not in love with me." Fitz makes a valiant attempt at smiling. "All along I thought I was the Doctor and you were the companion. And here I am being your Martha."

This kind of nonsense is exactly why he means so much to her. "You'll meet your Mickey."

He shakes his head. "Would you kiss me?" He holds up a hand to stop the protest he can obviously sense is coming. "We're scientists, Jemma. Why not just try an experiment?" He sounds defeated; he must already know. "Maybe you love me, and you just haven't figured it out yet. _I_ didn't, not for the longest time. If you kiss me, then maybe..."

She's blinking rapidly, but the tears fall anyway. "It wouldn't be fair."

He pulls a tissue out of his pocket and dabs at her face. "Come on; don't cry." She takes it from him. She doesn't want to be touched by him right now, and possibly not by anyone ever. "I just wish..." He sinks down onto her bed; the springs are unnaturally loud in that quiet room. He buries his face in his hands. "Jemma, this is the biggest thing I've ever felt. How is it possible you're not feeling it too?"

And with that, he exposes the true horror. They both shudder, suddenly aware of it.

Because they're _not_ one person. They _don't_ always know what they other one is thinking. They don't share a mind, a heart or a soul. They're friends from school, colleagues from a job that no longer exists. The closeness between them, the intimacy, the love- all of that is very possibly finite. 

It's very possibly ending.

"I'll kiss you." She will. She'll do anything to make crashing tide of realisations recede. "You're right, after all. How could I know unless I have all the facts?" She shuts her eyes and puckers her lips. She's never felt less romantic in her life.

"Jemma. Stop it." She opens her eyes to see the injured look in his. She's hurt him and the very thought makes her want to double over in agony herself. "It's insulting." 

"Fitz..." There's got to be something she can say. Something has to make this better. She opens and closes his mouth a couple of times, but there's nothing but silence between them. It's a thick, heavy silence; she breathes it in and it very nearly drowns her.

This time, when he leaves, she doesn't chase after him.


	2. Waiting for the sky to fall

They're halfway to the American border before it really sinks in for Jemma that she has no idea where they're going. 

Or why _he's_ with her. 

In fact, she barely remembers the last few hours. There was the time before, when she and Fitz were unpacking supplies in the musty little room they'd hand-picked to serve as their lab. That feels like a million years ago, as if the memory is already faded and scratchy like old videotape. And there's the time after, when she just couldn't pace around in her room anymore and the very need for some kind of undemanding, unjudging presence practically flung her down the corridor and made her shake Antoine Triplett into conciousness. She can still hear her own voice, insisting that she has to go, begging him to get her out of here. Those memories are wavy and nauseous; tinged with sickly yellow. The space in between those two periods is one she refuses to think about; those are minutes that she will not let her mind revisit. 

The very thought makes the tears come again, and Trip glances over. He doesn't know her well enough to be sure if he should ignore her crying or try to offer some kind of comfort. The people who do know her are the ones that she's just abandoned in the middle of the Canadian wilderness. The man who knows her best is getting further and further away with every passing second. The image plays across her mind like a nightmare she can't awaken from - Fitz coming to her room to try and make things better and finding her gone - and she can't hold back a wail of anguish.

"We can go back." Trip's voice is careful, like he thinks she might go feral at any moment. "I'll take you back, if you want."

She shakes her head. "Just pull over."

As soon as he does she unbuckles her seatbelt and climbs into the back of the van, wondering for the millionth time just how much Skye is going to hate her when she discovers that they've taken it. He follows her back there, his big body hunched over in the confined space.

"Jems-"

He doesn't even know that no one calls her that.

"Please shut up," she says. And then she fucks him.

She's never liked that word, but it's the only one that fits. This isn't love-making; she doesn't love him. And dealing with someone who she doesn't love, for a change, is such a thrilling relief that it fires up her body, hardens her nipples, makes her wet. So she fucks him hard, pulling his weight down on top of her, digging her heels into his back and biting his neck. When she comes, she screams so loudly that if there was anyone around to hear her they would swear she was suffering horribly.

Afterwards they lie together in their cooling sweat and she knows he's thinking what she's thinking. That they should keep moving, taking it in turns to sleep and drive. It's madness to just pass out here; they should both know that. Really, they should return to Providence and apologise for the stupidity of having run off into the night in the first place. But the organisation that taught them all of this no longer exists and there are no shoulds anymore. So instead they curl up around each other like they have some kind of reason to feel safe in each other's arms, like they're not just waiting to be ambushed or taken prisoner or worse. And Jemma's last thought before the darkness takes over is that he was wrong.

They can't go back.


	3. We never get to stop and open our eyes

They don't know what they want to do next, but they know what's needed. They have to establish some kind of base of operations and get their MO sorted out. They've got to recruit loyal agents, somehow sifting them from the mass of HYDRA sleepers crawling out of the woodwork every day. More than anything, they need to do _something_ to strike back against the seemingly unstoppable force destroying the organisation they've dedicated their lives to. And they can't do it alone.

The plan Trip comes up with is a good one. They contact retired or decommissioned S.H.I.E.L.D. agents, seeing if anyone is upset enough by recent events to want to get back into action. 

It's not without risks; it turns out that HYDRA's been operating within S.H.I.E.L.D. for a very long time, and on more than one occasion Trip needs to put his specialist training to good use. At first, Jemma shuts her eyes and covers her ears against the sounds of bones cracking and flesh splitting. Then, after a while, she stops.

It takes time but in the end they put together something that could pass for a team, even if no one is willing to use that word. They hole up at The Hostel, an old, long-abandoned S.H.I.E.L.D. facility on a windy Bermuda beach. It was designed to look like a broken-down backpackers' flophouse, rickety enough to be condemned. But underground, beneath the fake basement with the moldy mops and empty rum bottles and thick cobwebs, there's a base from which they can work.

The tech is outdated and they all struggle with it. Jemma prioritises; this is not a place for the luxuries of experimentation, creation and discovery. She'll need to dedicate herself to the medical side of things, and that's the machinery to which she gives her focus: the incubator, the x-ray machine. It's true that they may as well be tinkertoys compared to what she's used to working with, but engineering was never her strong point and there are days when she's so frustrated with yet _another_ malfunctioning component that it takes all her strength not to burst into tears.

Fitz would have everything up and running in days, but Fitz isn't here and there's no point in dwelling on that thought so she banishes it from her mind before it can take root and fester there like some kind of poisonous mushroom. Instead, she just grits her teeth and does what she can.

The staff quarters are in similarly bad shape; some of them are just plain unliveable. They both pretend that she and Trip are sharing a room because they don't want to take up more useable space than they need, so as to have more rooms available if other agents come to join them. Neither of them wants to admit that they wouldn't know what to do if they couldn't sink into each other's bodies at the end of another twenty-hour working day.

Neither of them can bear to confess that they're terrified to be alone.

The day she finally gets the solar generators running again is such a triumph that she whoops in delight, as thrilled as she was when she first learned that she'd been accepted to the S.H.I.E.L.D. Academy. She dances around the control room, so damn happy to finally have something _working_ that she doesn't realise that she's not alone until she hears Trip's soft laughter practically right beside her.

"Come on," he says, offering her a hand. 

Jemma demurs. She still has the refrigeration system to work on, and a whole list of other things after that. But he's insistent. "You've earned a break, Jems. Let's go topside."

They walk hand-in-hand along the beach. Jemma supposes they could pass for some young bohemian couple, with their grubby clothes and the sand sticking to their feet. She realises that it's actually nice here; she ought to take more time to breathe the sea air and watch the light dancing on the water. Her pleasures are few and far between these days; she should take them where she can.

"You think we might make this work?" Trip asks, and the rare peacefulness of the moment makes Jemma squeeze his hand and whisper that yes, actually, she does.

It isn't until later that she realises that he wasn't talking about saving S.H.I.E.L.D.


	4. These fragile bodies of touch and taste

There are no non-combatants anymore; Jemma has to learn to fight. 

To her surprise, she loves it. The rush of squeezing the trigger and feeling the gun jump in her hands, the momentum of a body falling when she lands a kick, the pleasurable sting of her torn-up knuckles after a hand-to-hand combat training session - there's no way to say it without being vulgar. These things turn her on.

Her body is changing, growing harder and more compact. Heaving around the heavy machinery in her makeshift lab is getting easier, which means that she has far fewer intrusive thoughts about how much easier it would be to get the room set up if Fitz were there to help her. She doesn't know if things hurt less now, but she's sure that she notices pain a whole lot less. The Jemma Simmons who would nurse a stubbed toe or be crippled by a particularly bad bout of period pain doesn't exist anymore. These days she tapes up her broken fingers and gets back to work.

After she comes to the realisation that in a fight her long hair is just a convenient handle for an assailant to grab hold of, she bites the bullet and cuts it short. It changes her face dramatically. The girl she sees in the mirror now wouldn't be deceived by a HYDRA spy pretending to be a friend or allow fear and embarrassment to drive a wedge between her and someone she loved. This girl isn't someone to be messed with, and she dares to think that the insides might just be starting to match the outsides.

She's tough, or at least she's getting there.

It translates well to the bedroom. She likes wrapping her legs around Trip and seeing the new muscles there clench. She likes pinning his hands above his head and realising that he actually has to exert some force to break free so he can flip her over and take her hard. Sex is acrobatic, an extension of the hours of working out they do. They push each other to the limits, both in the gym and between the threadbare sheets, and Jemma's limits are getting smaller and smaller every day.

That's never more obvious than when she miscalculates the distance between her sparring partner's head and the wall. When Agent Keegan takes a wild swing, Jemma takes full advantage without even thinking about it. Her sharp uppercut to the other woman's jaw sends Keegan flying, and she hits the steel-reinforced plaster hard. Jemma waits for her to get up and resume their fight, but Keegan just lies there, silent and still. Then the blood comes hot and thick - nothing bleeds like head wounds - and Jemma is horrified by how long it takes her to notice.

"She'll be fine," Trip says. "It was mostly superficial."

Jemma knows that, of course. She's the one who treated Keegan, stammering out apologies like the nervous little Agent Simmons she can barely even remember having once been. Keegan could have died; Jemma could have killed someone. And, someday, she might very well have to. That's what all this training is really about, after all.

She writes a letter, her handwriting shaky with nerves. _Dear Fitz, you wouldn't love me now, if you knew what I'm turning into. You couldn't._ Then she burns it. It would just cause questions, and she has no way of sending it anyway.

Actually, she has no way of getting in touch at all. Internet and the phones are ridiculously unsafe; she might as well broadcast both their locations to the entire world. She doesn't even _know_ Fitz's current location. He could be anywhere: still in Providence, back in Scotland, in a HYDRA jail, rotting under the ground. She curls up at the thought, instinctively protecting her heart. It does no good to think like this, but she can't stop the bad thoughts from coming.

She remembers the day Skye was shot, and her desperate need to get her friend's blood off her hands. Keegan is not Jemma's friend; she works hard to avoid forming friendships now. But Keegan must have had friends, once. She had been on a team, a proper S.H.I.E.L.D. team, not like this group. Somewhere in the world, there must be people who would have been horrified to see their friend helpless and hurt, and Jemma is the one who made her that way.

"I can't," She paces the length of their narrow room and wishes, harder than ever, that there was some place in The Hostel where she could just go to be _alone._ "Trip, I just can't."

"You're right." Trip nods his head. "You can't." 

He puts himself in her path, stopping her frantic strides. "You can't break down, Jems. You can't let this get to you. I know you hurt someone you didn't mean to hurt, and that sucks, but you've got to get over it. We're at war; we can't accommodate a panicker. You're gonna have to get it together, because we all need you."

Dimly, she wonders if things might have been different if someone had given her this speech months earlier.

"Do you?" Jemma asks, because she can't imagine it's true. She's never felt less useful in her life than she does at that particular moment. She can hear the nearly hysterical pitch of her words. "Do you really need me."

"Yeah." Trip's hand strokes her cheek, the skin rough but the touch gentle. "I sure as hell do."

And even though that's not what she'd meant at all, she suddenly feels much better.


	5. Spirits open to a thrust of grace

One day, Jemma captures a vehicle. It's her first, a HYDRA spy ship disguised as a private yacht. The agents she's working with are busy disabling all the tracking devices when Jemma hears the sound of glass breaking and realises a member of the HYDRA crew is still on the loose. She's the one who doubles back and ambushes the captain as he's heading for the lifeboat. It's her who neatly kicks his transmitter out of his hand and then shoots him, at close range, with her very own handmade Icer.

That means it's _her_ win; she gets something beside her name on the weekly achievements board other than 'rigged up a flu vaccine' or something similarly useful and unglamourous. The ship is _her_ plunder, _her_ booty, and although she will eventually take three more vehicles - two armoured cars and a helicopter, to be precise - there's nothing quite like her first. She fucking _loves_ that ship, and every piece of HYDRA technology or intel that they manage to scrounge from it is like another jewel emerging from a treasure chest that she personally dug up with her own two hands.

Once her teammates have finished stripping it down, Jemma moves in, taking over the captain's cabin. It's the first time she's made a choice for no reason except wanting to make it in as long as she can remember. She collects sea glass and pretty shells and keeps them in specimen jars on the windowsill. She begins making a quilt out of clothing too ragged for her teammates to wear anymore. It has a kind of faded charm.

When she helps Trip pack up his things for his own move to the ship, they both know it's a statement. They aren't just bunking together; they _live_ together, wherever it is that they live.

Jemma finds she desn't object to this at all. On the contrary, in fact.

They make a point of having sex in every single berth.

Their relationship isn't a secret and they've never made a point of being quiet, but being out of The Hostel gives them a rare sense of liberty nonetheless. 

It gives them the freedom to be gentle.

They've been together long enough that her parents, if they knew about Trip, would be secretively picking out china patterns by now, but she's surprised by how much there still is to discover about him. For one thing, he gives incredible foot massages. They leave her limp and sated, with a sweetly sexless satisfaction. He's amazed by her pesto aioli, which she manages to whip up with remants of supplies she found in the ship's galley. The look of rapture on his face when he bites into his sandwich soothes the ache in her chest at making this for anyone other than Fitz. It helps that Trip likes the spread slathered on, not just a hint.

She discovers that he finds her beautiful, and that it really matters to him that she thinks he's handsome. She resolves to tell him so every single day after that.

On the one year anniversary of the day she captured the ship, which she has, secretly, named the Darwin, Trip hacks a loose strip of brass from the control panel on the deck. That night he gives her a ring which he forged in The Hostel's workshop. It's roughly made but charming, hammered flat and set with one of her favourite bits of sea glass, a miniscule chip that she had almost missed during one of her beachcombing sessions until the sun caught it, making it glitter like a tiny emerald. Jemma is touched that he remembers the day she won their home and slides the shiny metal circle around her finger with a sense of real pride.

It isn't until days later, when she leaves it off because she's working with corrosive chemicals and he asks with obviously feigned casualness if she doesn't like it anymore, that it occurs to her that the ring might have more significance to him than she had previously thought.

She doesn't stop wearing it though.


	6. Never a breath you can afford to waste

Trip gets hurt, badly.

They've taken one of the helicopters - _her_ helicopter, in fact, the Curie - on what was supposed to be a peaceful prisoner exchange. Jemma goes along in case her captured teammates need medical treatment, and because she doesn't want to wait a moment longer than necessary to see Louvier and Krebbs again. Somewhere along the way, she started to care about these people, and she doesn't bother fighting that anymore.

She has HYDRA to fight. She doesn't need anything else.

But the HYDRA scum have apparently decided they'd rather have dead S.H.I.E.L.D. agents than their own people back again. They come in firing, and although the S.H.I.E.L.D. team use the prisoners for cover it's not long before the two HYDRA agents they'd brought to trade are dead and the bullets are still flying. 

Jemma empties clip after clip of bullets, shooting at anyone who's wearing a uniform and looks well-fed. But they're hopelessly outnumbered; just how many assholes did HYDRA think were necessary to take out their motley little group anyway? In the end they have to retreat back to the Curie and it's only because of HYDRA's own propulsion system, installed before she captured the helicopter, that they manage to get away at all.

She turns to Trip, looking for someone to curse the bastards with, and finds him pale and slumped on the floor. His hands, pressed against his left hip, are red with blood.

Jemma screams.

She's so grateful that she manages to give over to her training rather than her panic. She needs steady hands to dig the bits of bullet out of Trip; it shattered when it hit bone. And then there's the matter of setting the hip, repairing as much of the damage as she can and stitching him up again, while the Curie dips, turns and veers wildly in one direction and then another in an attempt to avoid turning up on HYDRA's radar. Jemma remembers that Trip's blood type is AB and gives a silent prayer of thanks; he's a universal recipient and that might just save his life. She radios back to The Hostel that everyone needs to start bleeding into bags, immediately.

She knows that Louvier and Krebbs are almost certainly dead right now. It's hard to believe it - Louvier with her fondness for terrible puns and Krebbs with his sad eyes and droopy moustache. She can't bear to lose Trip too.

Not now that, in a long overdue flash of awareness, she's finally realised just how in love with him she is.

She could berate herself, agonise over just what she'd been so afraid of before. But she knows what held her back. The way they live, it makes sense to avoid attachments, to deny them even when they're clearly undeniable. Still, she's done with sense for the time being. And if he recovers, she'll tell him.

No, not if. _When._ It has to be when.

During the long vigil she holds by his bedside, Jemma takes to making deals with the universe. She doesn't need her doctorates acknowledged again, or her professional qualifications revalidated. She doesn't even need an identity; she needs Trip. Her parents can think that she's dead; that ache is over and past in a way that she cannot imagine the agony of losing him ever would be. Her job, her family - she'll give them all up forever if he can be all right. And he still lies there, broken and silent.

It's desperation that makes her offer up the last thing she has to give. Fitz. Fitz and her secret dreams of making it all okay again. She stares at Trip's heart monitor as she makes her sacrifice. Her best friend can hate her forever.

But Antoine Triplett cannot die; life simply can't be that unfair.

And for once, she's right. On the third day after the botched exchange, as she's taking his vital signs and trying not to cry, he opens his eyes and turns his head towards her.

"Hey," he says, in a thin, reedy voice she barely recognises. "I don't know much about this kind of movie, but isn't this the moment when the violins swell and you throw yourself into my arms?"

It most certainly is.


	7. Dazzled by the beauty of it all

"Marry me," Trip says. And Jemma, already half asleep, laughs out loud.

"Okey dokey. Let me just go and ring up the vicar."

"I'm serious. I think it's a good idea. Why the hell not?"

Jemma groans and raises herself up on her elbows. "Would you like me to count the reasons?" When he nods, she decides to indulge his weird mood and ticks off her points on her fingers. "One - we don't legally exist, so getting a licence would be a wee bit difficult. Two - attempting to get a licence would tip off the authorities about where we are, and I don't fancy a honeymoon in a jail cell. Three - why do I even need a number three? Aren't the impossibility and the illegality enough?"

"Interesting arguments. Allow me to rebut?" Trip kisses each of her extended fingers. "I. Am so. Ridiculously in love with you."

And there's nothing she can say to counter that.

When she agrees, Trip whoops with joy. Jemma giggles, and then gasps as he scoops her out of bed and twirls her around. She admonishes him to be careful of his dodgy hip, but he seems to be well beyond pain at the moment. "Come on!" He sets her on her feet and runs to their closet. "Don't you have anything white?"

"What? You mean now?"

"Why wait? Like you say, we don't need to worry about the paperwork. Here, this'll work." He tosses a pale blue sundress at her, faded flowers and a torn up hem. "What, you think we need eight weeks to order a cake?"

Their teammates wake up in a hurry; they're used to being on alert. Jemma would have expected them to be annoyed at being roused in the middle of the night but they beam with excitement and put on their cleanest clothes to troop out onto the beach. It's only a matter of minutes before there's a circle of smiling people gathered by the water with Jemma and Trip right at the centre.

She's not sure, afterwards, what she says. She's never been good at improvising. But she knows she speaks from the heart when she talks about love, commitment and the deep and abiding connection that keeps her going through all the hard times. Trip says similar things and through her own tears Jemma can see that several of their most hardened teammates are also crying. Trip, on the other hand, is giving her a grin that threatens to split his face in half. When he announces to their gathered friends that he now declares them man and wife she kisses him hard and knows that he was right. 

This was a very good idea.

She's surprised to wake up alone the next morning. Or, rather, the next afternoon; having a lie-in is an almost unheard of luxury at The Hostel and she definitely owes her teammates a million and one favours for letting her sleep in. But where is her husband?

She finds him on the beach, talking to the sky. She's beginning to worry all this erratic behaviour could be the sign of a brain tumour or something similar, but he's quite rational in his embarrassment when she asks him exactly what he's doing.

"Truthfully?" Trip asks. "You're gonna laugh."

Jemma sits on the beach, digging her toes into the sand. "Try me."

"It's like this. You remember Fitz, your friend from Team Six?"

Jemma swallows hard; Fitz still occupies a tender spot in her heart. "Of course."

Trip flops down beside her. "I know it's silly, but I just wanted to let him know."

"Know what?"

"That I mean to honour my vows." He laces their fingers together and stares out over the water. "I came out here to... I don't know... _tell_ him. That I'll treat you right, for the rest of our lives. That he doesn't have to worry. Because I'll be good to you."

Jemma draws a ragged breath. Lying her head on Trip's shoulder, she tries to find the same point on the horizon that he's focussing on. She imagines curly hair and blue eyes, a sweet smile at her happiness. "It's true." She whispers the words across the miles. "He really will."


	8. Nothing worth having comes without some kind of fight

It begins as what passes for an ordinary day in the new world order. Jemma and Trip wake up early. He does a half hour of weight-lifting with cans filled with seawater; she does some stretches that would probably horrify a yoga purist but which help her work out the kinks in her muscles that their lumpy mattress inevitably brings on. They make their usual breakfast of instant porridge, canned milk and a vile drink made of pressed leaves which they like to pretend is tea. They eat it while torturing each other with with tantalising descriptions of eggs, bacon and toast. Reluctantly they agree that there hasn't been enough rain recently for them to be able to afford the luxury of a shower so they just give each other sponge baths at the sink, which is its own kind of fun.

Trip's hands linger over her belly; the hard roundness there is just beginning to take shape. Soon even her loosest jumpers will no longer be enough to hide her condition, and then her teammates will stop wondering why she's suddenly stopped volunteering for missions that involve any kind of physical danger. She knows there will be fear, but also joy. And in time they'll all adjust.

As someone very dear once told her, the time is now. Embrace the change.

Reasonably clean, they begin the short walk up the beach to The Hostel. And then Melinda May is there and the day becomes anything but ordinary.

Jemma just stares at her, because this is impossible. Seeing May now, in real life, is like having the tooth fairy come knocking at her door. May is a remnant of an earlier and far more innocent time in her life and Jemma had given both her and then up for lost a long time ago.

May seems to understand how stunned she is, because she addresses most of her proposal to Trip. None of it, not the _we're going public_ , not the _it's time to call them out_ , not even the _Fury's back; he's alive and he's got resources_ are anywhere near as surprising as May's simple, physical presence. It isn't until May tells her that Fitz really wants to see her that she snaps back to reality.

"He misses you." There's something in the older woman's tone that Jemma can't get put her finger on. "He talks about you all the time. For a while, he didn't, but now he does. That's actually how we figured out that he's really okay."

"Fitz?" She asks, sounding as far from intelligent as she ever has. "Fitz is alive?"

May nods. "We've been working together. We've... stayed together." She's toying with something on her left hand. It's a ring, a smooth band of heavy stainless steel with a thinner strip of black metal running around the centre. It has a sort of industrial beauty; it was obviously crafted by a very talented engineer. It's utterly unlike Jemma's brass ring in every way possible, except in the most important way. 

"You and Fitz?" Jemma can't imagine an odder couple, but she finds that she is so happy for them both. "It's good?"

"He calls me Mickey." And Jemma almost chokes on her laughter.

"It's a compliment, really." She tries to reassure May. "It's from-"

May gives her a wry smile as she cuts her off. "Simmons. We've been together for quite a while. You really don't think he's made me watch all the Doctor Whos?"

"Several times, I'd imagine."

"Four is my favourite." May's eyes take on a softness that Jemma never imagined could be there. "He wanted to come along, when he heard you might be here. It's Fury that said no. We've got the element of surprise on our side at the moment but that won't last, so anyone with any kind of engineering skill is doing weapons refitting all day long. I promised him I'd bring you back though, safe and sound." She rubs at her ring again. "I gave him my word."

"And Skye?" She is slightly afraid of the answer, but she needs to know. "Coulson?"

May draws a sharp breath. "We're not sure. I think Coulson's in France, but that subgroup lost communications a while ago. Skye's deep undercover, or at least that's what-" Jemma's worry must be obvious from her face because May suddenly stops short. "We're trying to find them. If it's at all possible, Fury will make it happen." She gives Jemma a hard look that makes her look like her old self again. "Skye was really pissed off about the van." And, unbelievably, Jemma feels herself blushing.

May turns back to Trip. "From what I've gathered, the folks out here are a lot more likely to join up with the people at headquarters if you say you're for it. We need all the hands that we can get. Can we count on your help?"

Trip glances over at Jemma, and she can sense how overwhelmed he is by all of this. "Jemma? Your thoughts?"

It's a good question, and she wishes she knew the answer. But her thoughts are all twisted around in her head; she can't get them straight. She wonders if they can trust May; it seems like a betrayal to even think it, but anyone could be a traitor. Still, her gut says that May's being sincere.

She also wonders what Fitz would think of her now, muscled and scarred, married and pregnant, with a running tally of HYDRA agents whom she's personally bested that recently spilled over into the triple digits. She's so different from the girl he knew. It's possible that Fitz has changed as much as she has, and in that case will they even know each other any more? Is it better to leave him with memories?

Jemma isn't sure, although she realises that she desperately wants to find out.

More than anything, she wonders if what May is proposing is even possible. Can they really bring S.H.I.E.L.D. back? And should they? Is it right to have an organisation as powerful as S.H.I.E.L.D. unrivalled and unchecked in this kind of world?

"Jems?" Trip's voice cuts through her confusion with that old, beloved nickname. "Do you want to go back?"

Jemma shakes her head. Without looking over, she finds his hand; taking it in her own grounds her enough to reply. "We can't do that. It's not possible; it never has been. But I'd like to go forward."

**Author's Note:**

> Written for flipflop_diva for the 2014 Rare Women Fanfic Exchange. Flipflop_diva, I couldn't have been happier to see a request asking for Simmons saving the day with her smarts! I hope this fulfills that request.
> 
> The fic and chapter titles are from "Lovers in a Dangerous Time" by Bruce Cockburn.


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